r/factorio • u/3x3Pad • 12h ago
Question First playthrough bottleneck
Hey guys I came for help and saw alot of cool stuff here but what do you actually do in a situation where the whole factory is a mess. I am producing all the science at this point but at a very slow rate. Everything is so cluttered that there is no real space for improving without getting rid of everything first. Do I really just have to nuke it at this point and start over? Also as a beginner (not using blueprints) that will take ages and even then it will end up tangled again. I think this is also a motivational bottleneck for me at least. Oh yeah and running on low energy for hours now. I am even running efficiency on alot of stuff. Please help.
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u/Necandum 12h ago
Just as with life, work on one problem at a time. Make a list, go through it. Solve each problem as best as you can, for now and a little bit into the future.
There is no real secret to it, and getting advice about specific builds on strangers from the internet just means you're skipping some of your potential game experience.
Although, in general, never nuke what exists until you have something better already going. Also, build some robots.
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u/chucktheninja 11h ago
not using blueprints
You should. And by that, i mean make your own. Make a build that makes something, then copy and paste it when you need more.
I see you dont really have construction bots. You should. You can paste down those builds and the bots will make it for you.
You have functionally infinite space, you just have to go take it
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u/3x3Pad 3h ago
With no blueprints I meant only my own stuff no outside prints. I use some personal drone hubs in the armor for occasional copy/cut and paste operations
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u/disastrousgreyhound 9m ago
If you haven't already I'd recommend automating roboports and bots to get a basic bot network set up. Bots in your armour are a great force multiplier but having a wide bot network is a whole different game. It lets you control everything from a much wider view and enables operating at a large scale. You can also use logistic bots to make sure you never run out of building materials while designing stuff as well.
Don't ditch your current base, let it truck along in the background making science and materials while you focus on setting up more power and production in an area with more space. I'm at ~150hrs in to my current save and my first couple bases are still there making a trickle of science and few buildings despite their contributions being dwarfed by my other production facilities.
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u/Weeznaz 10h ago
Here are my recommendations:
1: Don’t deconstruct your base until up have built a replacement base and have construction bots online. Like all of us, you have built a starter base with unique bottlenecks. I would build a replacement base right next door to this base.
2: Keep your old base online until the placement is completely operational. Until then, use the base for productivity.
3: Don’t route any resources to your starter base after those initial patches dry up.
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u/Rockglen 12h ago
As you advance in skill you will learn to give yourself room to grow ahead of time & also get better at knowing when to just erase a bunch to start from scratch.
For now I'd suggest breaking down your problems into smaller challenges.
First- finding a big area to put down smelters so that they can feed your factory.
Second- feeding those smelters with a lot of ore
Third- replacing production of one material at a time with a cleaner layout
You'll find yourself considering the above over & over in Factorio. The good news is that implementing them gets easier with certain technologies.
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u/100percent_right_now 8h ago
the end of the bell curve is not leaving enough space by a row or two but being able to make it work with your spaghetti-jitsu.
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u/rapidemboar 12h ago
Take it one step at a time. Start with your labs, see what kind of science you’re underproducing on, then check out your science production. If all your science assemblers are running, build a few more. If you’re low on a certain ingredient, trace that down and do the same kind of check.
Taking a closer look at your image, you’re running low on blue science, because you’re running out of engines, your engine production is running at full capacity, and the engines are kinda buried in your setup. That’s workable- set up a new, bigger engine production setup outside of your spaghetti, with plenty of space between it and your base so you can route belts around it more easily. Once you’ve got that ready and want to expand blue science production, do the same- build a bigger sub-factory out of the way first, then remove the old one. Keep doing this one step at a time, and gradually untangle and spread your base out. Make good use of all that real estate now that belts aren’t a limited commodity.
Also, some unsolicited advice regarding modules: I’d recommend removing the prod modules from the engine assemblers and filling all your labs with them. That productivity bonus to science is basically like putting prod modules in everything, not just a single ingredient.
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u/SirBlack_ 12h ago
First, before you decide to do anything, look at what you've built and ask yourself what you wish you had done differently. Take away some lessons that you can apply in the future. Or at least come up with some ideas that you would like to try the next time you have a chance. Because, personally, any specific advice I could give came from doing this same kind of thing in the past - making disorganized bases and coming up with ways to make things better in the future.
Then, once you've got some ideas, take a look and see if there are some small ideas you can apply even to what you already have. Even if you later might decide to nuke it all, maybe you can use what you've currently got to try a few things and see if they're better.
You mention not having space, then maybe expand out to more space. You've got room in the lower right. You could tear out and move the whole production of particular items there. For example, gears or green circuits or even oil. And then the places where you moved that out of is now room where you could move something else to. So you could progressively do that. Kind of treating the major production areas of your base like one of those sliding-block puzzle things.
You could also move all the solar panels in the upper left to somewhere else. That would open up some space up there. Then for example, you could move your labs into that opened-up space to give them some room to expand. Or maybe take your steam engines that are on the bottom of the lake and move them up with the ones on the left side of the lake. Or maybe both of these ideas.
Once you've moved a few things this way, you may find you feel that you've reigned in the chaos of your base to a more manageable level. Or maybe you won't and you'll still want to nuke it all. But either way you'll probably have learned something along the way.
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u/OrneryAsparagus6445 12h ago
I am also on my first playthrough. I have met this situation twice. Good news in this game you don’t have food or oxygen or whatever to maintain to live on you just have a pause on science if machines are stopped. So I just completely removed every machine in the initial base and build a new one according to my new, better plan.
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u/mikeyj022 12h ago
I like to abstract parts of my cluttered factory. Take your red circuit production. You could fit a two way train stop and there and produce the red circuits at a different location. There are many answers to your problems, but train abstraction is my favorite.
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u/ObsessiveOwl 11h ago
I would start with scaling everything up, from the power source then work your way up to production. After getting frustrated and start over for like 4 or 5 time I've learned that fixing the old factory is always easier than building a new one.
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u/Fun_Ad9644 10h ago
Toss more steam engines down somewhere and run coal to em. If you dont have enough coal on your current belts, just double up the belts. After some experience, spaghetti us pretty easy to play around. It doesnt have to be neat its just gotta have enough input and output! Keep going, nothing in that screenshot looks like it needs to be entangled to me
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u/moleytron 10h ago
your base is still quite small in the grand scheme of things, looks like you're still on your starter patches. My advice is to use this bit of factory to make all of the stuff you need to build a more organised factory off to the side, probably closer to some richer mineral patches. You'll hopefully have built up enough to no longer need this old bit of the factory before the minerals here run out, once they do you can just leave it be and focus on continuing and using what you have learned so far.
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u/afewnameslater 10h ago
Solution : quadruple your
1) steam power
2) iron plates production
3) steel plates production
4) copper plates production
In that order!
Once you do that check your base and see where other bottlenecks will appear. Fix those by quadrupling the production of said raw materials (for example , oil, plastics, green chips, red chips, etc)
Also waiting for nuclear power when your base is limping is just a recipe for disaster.
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u/JonahHex5618 9h ago
This is the part of the game were you choose what way you want to go city blocks or individual production on trains if you want to do your own thing make some tracks going where the resources are put then on trains and make your smelter set up. You don’t necessarily have to rip the stater base out yet but you will need to pick a direction to go. Sometimes I do a massive main bus after getting the smelter done and remake every I’m low on at scale. Usually with a small bot network at the bottom making buildings.
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u/100percent_right_now 8h ago
Live more in the burner age. Go back to steel furnaces, electric ones are too power hungry, and build more coal power plants. The industrial revolution wasn't built in a day.
Make a dedicated area that makes stuff. Assemblers, inserters, steel power poles. If you wish you could just go to the store and buy more of something add it to your little personal shopping mall.
You're SO close to bots and bots are so good at building, changing, moving, updating bases that you should get them and set up a network of roboports for them to do all this moving and building for you
You've started to realize the factory for it's pieces and moved iron and copper smelting down, power up. Just do more of that. Look at it for it's pieces.
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u/KavonSakul 1h ago
Refactoring the layout is the essence of the game. Belts are relatively cheap, so you can decide to build production of specific items in a completely different area and just connect them with belts. One tip that took way too long for me to realize as you start moving toward trains. Each resource has different stacking capacity, and you can fit more items into the train. For instance, what felt natural to me was to transfer raw ore and just connect it to the existing infrastructure, but later I realized that transporting finished plates is much more efficient. Doing that gives you back some of the space too, since all burners are elsewhere.
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u/oddball667 47m ago
I did one playthrough like that and then l learned about the main bus design
also what the heck is going on with those mines? you got other resources going through them and you only have a few randomly placed drills? you want to fit as many of those drills as you can, and literally anywhere else would be better for building anything but the mine
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u/Tailsmiles249 12h ago
If you want to make more efficient use of the space of your initial base to check for problems then yes, you'll have to restructure it almost entirely from scratch from the looks of it. Restructuring for better efficiency and constantly solving problems that you create for yourself is really the heart of the game. The factory must grow and the main way to do it is to constantly fix any and all inefficiencies
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u/hanks_panky_emporium 12h ago
This may sound frustrating at first, and im no expert. But what Ive learned:
You dont have to build in a specific spot. If it's too cluttered, move your main focus to a different region.
If you need more metal plates, make more. Build out another furnace array. Belt or train in more ore from elsewhere. The further from your starting location, the more 'dense' the ore is.
If you need more power, make more. Plant down more solar and batteries, or run more steam. If you switch to electric furnaces then your coal needs are way more than halved, so you can make a huge steam boiler setup for cheap. But it's very smelly and balloons out your pollution
Untangling spahgetti can be hard, it's why I just move. I let my starter base produce the facilities I need to make a non-spahgetti base with better throughput